According to classical utilitarianism, well-being consists in pleasure or happiness, the good consists in the sum of well-being, and moral rightness consists in maximizing the good. Leibniz was perhaps the first to formulate this doctrine. Bentham made it widely known. For a long time, however, the second, summing part lacked any clear foundation. John Stuart Mill, Henry Sidgwick, and Richard Hare all gave arguments for utilitarianism, but they took this summing part for granted. It was John Harsanyi who finally presented compelling arguments for this controversial part of the utilitarian doctrine.
About the Authors
Johan Gustafsson is a research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, a senior research fellow in philosophy at University of York, and a docent in practical philosophy at Institute for Futures Studies. He work primarily on the parts of philosophy that relate to the question of what we ought to do, either morally or rationally. Much of his work covers theoretical problems in ethics, value theory, and political philosophy. And much of the rest is on decision theory and, more specifically, on money pumps and moral uncertainty.
Kacper Kowalczyk is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Health at Rutgers University and a visiting scholar in the Rutgers Philosophy Department. From 2020 to 2024, Ihe was a lecturer and research fellow in the Philosophy Department at University College London. He received a DPhil in Philosophy from Oxford in 2021, a BPhil in Philosophy from Oxford in 2016, and a BA in Philosophy from Cambridge in 2014. He is interested in population ethics, personal identity, equality, aggregation, risk, and decision theory.
